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Jeddah

    “You see that building over there?”
    A large dome emerged under a hazy skyline orange under the sinking sun.
    The taxi driver turned back toward me, a mischievous glint in his eye, stubble glistening with sweat; it was easily ninety in the early evening.
    I was glad to be enjoying a McFlurry with M & M’s.
    He eyed me from the rearview, a small banner of the Saudi flag swinging beneath it, almost in tune with the Yanni track droning in high treble from some cheap speakers behind my doilied headrest.
    “Mosque. Next to that, that’s where they have the beheadings.”
    I didn’t reply but stared off toward the domed building that was now just off to the left of us, nestled between nondescript brownish buildings, which I later learned were government buildings.
    To drive the point home, he elaborated. “The public executions. That’s where they do it. In the square.”
    He cracked a bright gold-toothed grin. He was proud of this place, or at least it amused him to tell this story to a young looking westerner eating a McFlurry while dressed in a blazer punctuated with a bright Hermes tie. Or perhaps his intent was more warning than casual boast: this is what crime and punishment looks like here, my friend.

    Ten minutes before getting into the taxi, I had pulled open a familiar looking glass door that sent a blast of cool air into my nose. I might as well have been walking through a door in a strip mall in Orange county California. The differences were so slight as to stun one with a momentary feeling of dislocation. Until I noticed a partition that cleanly and overtly divided the restaurant into two mirror-like portions. I quickly drew my bearings, and though slow in many regards, I rather quickly devised that singles were on one side and married couples were on the other. A sign with those very instructions printed in a bold pail blue font was plastered just outside of the entrance. Simple and severe. At least that was my feeling as I soaked up this new arrangement. Yet, despite the many problems with this scene, I was so glad to be able to order my McFlurry and to receive it, moments later, cold in my hands under the oven-like dusk as I awaited a taxi to return me to my plush hotel in the heart of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
    I was not in town for reasons of espionage or something cool like that, oozing intrigue. I was merely a salesman representing a prestigious California university’s English language programs, which were highly desirable to Saudi students who were eligible for so called “kings scholarships,” which awarded them a blank check to study in the United States until they had exhausted the academic degrees available to them. Saudi Arabia, I quickly learned, was a cash cow for American institutions of higher learning. Men in blazers and rep-striped ties would clamor over throngs of discriminate Saudi educational consumers on visits to institutions throughout the country. Students under “king’s scholarships” were known to purchase houses, cars and god knows what else while in the U.S (see recent press on various allegations of international students fleeing prosecution for a variety of crimes). They could pursue PhDs so long as they could attain acceptance, which often was granted despite questionable academic credentials. I found many of the students I encountered to be highly articulate, considerate, and always eager to know how close our university was situated to Hollywood, the beach, and Las Vegas, in no particular order.

    Again I took in the orange haze enshrouding the locale where the executions and, I suppose, floggings, and whatever other medieval punishments were carried out there. The smell of exhaust and warm desert air permeated the shabby interior of the sedan.
    I tried to imagine the spectacle. “Who can watch?” I asked. “Can any Saudi?”
    The driver eyeballed me cautiously, but I could also see a glint of that same giddiness and pride I noticed moments before.
    “You would like to see that, my friend?” He asked, skillfully dodging my question. I had been warned by seasoned colleagues familiar with this part of the world that I would be watched during my stay in Jeddah and to be cautious with my words and actions. Okay, I remember thinking, as I sauntered into the arrival area of the airport. Something to keep in mind.
    But it is hard to embrace that mindset while digging through a cup to find the last few M & Ms in a McFlurry. One has to snap out of it and remember: we’re not in Kansas anymore!
    As we rounded the dome of death and flushed out into a grand avenue packed with motorbikes darting from lane to lane like tattered wasps and an occasional Mercedes Maybach floating among them like a hearse carrying a member of the living dead, or probably a prince, I thought of this whole notion and the messy business carried out in the square beside the Mosque. Lex talionis. Eye for an eye. So this is how it’s done here.
    I suddenly remembered the incident on a sunny day back in Riverside when I was an elementary school boy. Fifth or sixth grade. I can’t recall. I had straggled behind my brother on the walk home that was on hindsight nothing more than a mile but at the time felt like a walk through the Sahara desert without water and a fifty-pound satchel.
    I had just begun to round the edge of a playing field that ran up to the chain link fence of an Epsicopalian school, as a brood of three or four boys my age materialized. The leader among them, a taller boy who wore his shorts high and his shirt tucked in, lunged toward the fence and called out to me. I remember his dark brown hair flopped over in the wind similar to the haircut J.F.K. wore in many of the photographs and film footage I had seen. And I recall his teeth, large front teeth that made him appear angrier than he possibly was.
    “Hey fucker!” He said through a diamond in the fence. That’s all he said. Until he said it again yet in a calmer tone, stretching the same two words out this time. “Hey Fuuuucker.” The others were quiet aside from a nondescript murmur. I remember wondering why he just repeated the same thing again, as if he couldn’t think of anything better. This was a private church school after all. Perhaps he wasn’t well practiced in issuing shocking invective.
    The best and most memorable part of the interaction was not a witty volley of insults and eventual victory for me or my counterpart; nor was it a climactic skirmish over the fence and haphazard round of fisticuffs ending in notable bloodshed. Neither of those seeming eventualities took place. Yet what transpired in those few moments on a quiet Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon stands in my mind as one of the single greatest memories I have.
    “Really?” you might say out loud, head cocked with a mixture of uncertainty, disappointment and pity swirled on your face, after you learn what took place. But know this, dear reader: there is not a single instance when I have taken the high road, held my tongue, or hesitated and yielded to that voice in my head that says “think through this; don’t do anything you might regret; or, one of my favorites: it’s not worth it when the memory of those few moments on that blinding hot afternoon does not rapidly surface to the forefront of my awareness.
    I remember reaching into my pants pocket and finding it there. In hindsight it seems as though time had slowed down, as the cliché goes, so that I can actually remember my disbelief at finding the object in my pocket. It seemed as if an act of God that such an object would be there at just such a moment of need. A small miracle indeed. A hint of the mysteries of the universe and the subtle winks and nudges that lead us to moments that are recalled as sublime, righteous and perfectly just.
    The brood remained poised in their denouncement of my presence beside their school. Surely, their conviction would have disintegrated if they knew what was coming. From my pocket, I pulled out the thick brown rubber band, warm and flaccid. A heavy-duty packing rubber band. Thick and trustworthy. Without even thinking I aimed it and released it. I watched in utter disbelief as it screamed violently through one of the fence diamonds with an aerodynamic buzz and snapped the boy directly in the eye. Bulls-eye!
    I was stunned. A golden light seemed to hover around my position and dampened the scream of the boy who was now running as fast as he could with his lackeys behind him. I can still visualize his expression crumpling from one of protected dominance to one of total defeat and humiliation. The transformation was instantaneous. I was in disbelief that the rubber band had materialized in my pocket and that I had made such an impossible shot. How the tables can turn!
    What is it about those few moments that stick with me and follow me around as I negotiate this humiliation or that embarrassment on the road of life? Was it a rare moment of empowerment fueled by a bit of luck? A rare symmetry between a rather bothersome yet benign injustice and stinging retaliation? I can’t deny the pleasure I feel when I think of the surprised look on that kid’s face when the unexpected suddenly consumed the moment. It was not exactly eye for an eye, and I’m sure the smart of my revenge wore away soon after, as did the effect of the offense on my pride.
    Yet as I considered these matters under the sun sinking into the Red Sea, nearly arrived back at my hotel, I wondered how much satisfaction could really be gotten from watching the blood spill in one of these public spectacles. How would it feel to watch the head fall from the individual who murdered your child? Yes, I know it may seem absurd to compare the sting of a rubber band to a beheading or any of the other gruesome punishments carried out in Saudi Arabia, but I can’t help but wonder if there is that place in the heart that feels a deep sense of justice has been exacted by such a revengeful act.
    Nevertheless, there is no shortage of testimonials attesting to the deep dissatisfaction and lack of closure that is sustained by a victim’s family after the execution of the perpetrator. The continuation of the cycle of violence is often what seems to emerge from these cases and begs one to reflect on the mysterious and pirmal power of forgiveness and on powerful social movements that were based on a strict adherence to the principle of non-violence, such as that enacted by Mahatma Ghandi and later Martin Luther King Jr., under the advisement of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
    As I paid the taxi driver and opened my door to the heat like the breath from a blast furnace, I wondered what it would feel like all these years later to have simply smirked and walked away from the boys on the other side of that fence.

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